Friday the 13th has been a dormant franchise for almost two decades, but Sweet Revenge is here to finally break that slumber. Due to years of legal entanglements, the series has not been able to produce an official new project since the 2009 remake/reboot/restart/recycle Friday the 13th. Thankfully, all that hullabaloo has been quieted and there is now… Jason Universe (Jason Un1v3rse if you’re nasty), an all-encompassing brand banner for the future of the series.
We’ll talk about that in a bit, but it’s important to note that their first official restart of the Friday the 13th saga is with Sweet Revenge, a short film that seems to act as something of a tidy little tale anyone can just jump into. Well, as long as they have some kind of understanding of who Jason Voorhees is as a mythical boogeyman.
I’m not going to become some foaming-at-the-mouth Friday the 13th fan and break down the entire Sweet Revenge short — you can watch it at this link since we can’t embed age-restricted videos, but I hope you’ll read my carefully chosen words as well — but I do want to talk about a few things it presents in regards to what we can expect from the future of the franchise.
Friday the 13th Really Is the Unluckiest Day of the Year
At a very base level, I think it’s fair to say that the name “Friday the 13th” is going the way of the dodo. The Jason Universe branding, as well as naming this short Sweet Revenge, shows that there is still likely a legal issue with titling anything “Friday the 13th.”
That specific title is still under the auspices of Paramount, the studio that originally produced and distributed the Friday the 13th films. It’s a shame since that is such an indelible title, but it looks like this future iteration of Jason Voorhees will have to do without it. We know that the upcoming television series is titled Crystal Lake, so it sure seems like it’s time to admit that Friday the 13th is an unlucky day.
But, let’s talk about Crystal Lake and what Sweet Revenge might be telling us.
Jason’s World Gets Weirder
Sweet Revenge takes an interesting turn with its Final Girl protagonist, Eve (Ally Ioannides), where she is taken under the lake by Jason during daytime and re-emerges well after nightfall. It’s a jarring jump in time, not to mention Eve’s appearance once she pops back up. She looks like she might be undead herself. And with the path her character takes by the end, it sure seems like she’s been put on equal footing with whatever this version of Jason Voorhees is.
So, what does this have to do with the Crystal Lake television series in the pipeline? For starters, my assumption is that this Jason Universe branding is an attempt to create a canon umbrella for the future of the franchise. I hate even typing that kind of terminology, but the Cinematic Universe is a model that franchise properties keep wanting to adopt. It stands to reason that anything produced under the Jason Universe banner — short films, feature films, TV shows, video games, diapers — would be subjected to some kind of established canon.
Therefore, could Sweet Revenge be a mini-episode of backstory for Crystal Lake? Eve could be another spectral/undead character haunting the grounds of the former campsite. Perhaps this will establish some kind of lore (blech) for the way this new Jason works in the Jason Universe.
We’ll have to wait and see, but you can watch Sweet Revenge and get your own theories going. I just hope the next time we see Jason, he looks a little less like a Spirit Halloween mannequin.
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